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Why Is Gender So Complex? Some Typological Considerations Johanna Nichols University of California, Berkeley Higher School of Economics, Moscow University of Helsinki

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Why Is Gender So Complex? Some Typological Considerations Johanna Nichols University of California, Berkeley Higher School of Economics, Moscow University of Helsinki Chapter 4 Why is gender so complex? Some typological considerations Johanna Nichols University of California, Berkeley Higher School of Economics, Moscow University of Helsinki A cross-linguistic survey shows that languages with gender can have very high levels of morphological complexity, especially where gender is coexponential with case as in many Indo-European languages. If languages with gender are complex overall, apart from their gender, then gender can be regarded as an epiphenomenon of overall language complexity that tends to arise only as an incidental complica- tion in already complex morphological systems. I test and falsify that hypothesis; apart from the gender paradigms themselves, gender languages are no more com- plex than others. The same is shown for the other main classificatory categories of nouns, numeral classifiers and possessive classes. Person, the other important indexation category, proves to be less complex, and I propose that the reason for this is that person, but not gender, is referential, allowing hierarchical patterning to emerge as a decomplexifying mechanism. Keywords: gender, case, numeral classifiers, possessive classes, person hierarchy, referential, inflection, canonical complexity, simplification, diachronic stability. 1 Introduction There can be little doubt that gender systems are complex, and in various ways: compare the large number of gender classes in Bantu languages, the intricate and opaque fusion with case, number, and declension class in conservative Indo- European languages, the extensive allomorphy of Tsakhur gender agreement Johanna Nichols. 2019. Why is gender so complex? Some typological considerations. In Francesca Di Garbo, Bruno Olsson & Bernhard Wälchli (eds.), Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity: Volume I: General issues and specific studies, 63–92. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3462760 Johanna Nichols (Nakh-Daghestanian; examples below), or the semantically unpredictable gen- ders of Spanish or French nouns. Even for Avar (Nakh-Daghestanian), which has a three-gender system with almost no allomorphy of gender markers and complete semantic predictability, there is a random division of verbs into those that take gender agreement and those that do not. The open question about the complexity of gender systems is why? Here I propose an answer based on two factors: one is the inexorable growth of complexity as a maturation phenomenon that can continue indefinitely unless braked by some simplification processDahl ( 2004; Trudgill 2011), and the other is a self-correcting measure that is available to some agreement categories but not to gender, for reasons probably having to do with referentiality. Two different ways of measuring and comparing complexity will be used here. The first is what I will call inventory complexity, which goes by various names (e.g. Dahl 2004: resources, Miestamo 2008: taxonomic complexity, Di Garbo & Mies- tamo 2019 [in Volume II]: the principle of fewer distinctions): the number of ele- ments in the inventory or values in a system, for some domain such as the num- ber of phonemes, tones, genders, classifiers, derivation types, basic alignments, or basic word orders, or the degree of verb inflectional synthesis. Inventory com- plexity figures in Dahl (2004), Shosted (2006), Nichols (2009), Donohue & Nichols (2011), and many other works. It is not a very accurate or satisfactory measure of complexity, not least because it does not measure non-transparency, which is the kind of complexity that has been shown to be shaped by sociolinguistics (Trudgill 2011); but it is straightforward to calculate (though data gathering can be laborious), and appears to correlate reasonably well with other, better mea- sures of complexity. Below I use inventory complexity to compare complexity levels of different languages for the practical reason that there is an existing database of inventory complexity (that of Nichols 2009, subsequently expanded) which counts items across several phonological, morphological, and syntactic subsystems across 200 languages. The other measure used here is descriptive complexity or Kolmogorov complex- ity: the amount of information required to describe a system. This is a better measure and captures well the non-transparency relevant to learnability and prone to be shaped by sociolinguistics, but it is very difficult to measure and compare. Here I follow Nichols (2016; forthcoming) in using canonicality theory (Corbett 2007; 2013; 2015; and others) as an approximate measure of descriptive complexity (though not an exact equivalent; some differences are noted below); see Audring (2017) for a similar approach. Canonicality theory is not primarily a 64 4 Why is gender so complex? Some typological considerations complexity measure but a theoretical undertaking that aims at improving defini- tions and technical understanding of linguistic notions. It defines a logical space (for a linguistic concept or structure or system) by determining the central, or ideal, position in that space and attested kinds of departures from that ideal, and measuring non-canonicality as the extent of departure (or number of departures) from the ideal. A central notion in defining the ideal position is the structural- ist notion of biuniqueness, or one form, one function; any departure from that ideal is non-canonical. The literature on canonicality offers a good deal ofwork on morphological paradigms, which makes it a straightforward matter to count the number of non-canonicalities in a paradigm. I use canonicality theory partly because of the availability of this previous work and partly because it is well grounded in morphological theory (and taken seriously by theoreticians) yet ap- plicable on its own without requiring adoption of an entire comprehensive for- mal framework. I survey this kind of complexity with a different database that samples morphological subsystems as sparingly as possible in order to keep the survey manageable (underway; 80 languages so far). In what follows I illustrate descriptive complexity with some inflectional para- digms and show how much information grammars need to present (and do pre- sent) to adequately describe some of those paradigms (§2); this shows that the presence of gender in a paradigm can make it extremely complex by the inven- tory metric. But is it the gender morphology itself that is complex? Or is gender rather an epiphenomenon of overall language complexity, a category that tends to arise only as an incidental complication in already complex morphological sys- tems? §3 and §4 raise and falsify the hypothesis that gender – and classification more generally – is embedded primarily in already complex languages, show- ing that it is gender itself that is complex. §5 compares the complexity levels of person, the other important indexation category. It appears that descriptive complexity easily becomes great in the indexation categories, and that person has recourse to self-correcting, self-simplifying mechanisms that gender lacks. More precisely, person has means of self-correction and self-simplification other than sheer reduction of inventory size or overall loss of the category – apparently unlike gender. This partly accounts for the great diachronic stability of gender systems (Matasović 2014) and in particular the remarkable stability of complex- ity in gender systems. The reason for the different behavior of gender and person appears to be that person, but not gender, is referential. The concluding section (§6) considers some ramifications of this claim. 65 Johanna Nichols 2 Complexity in gender: Examples and measurement Gender systems can be complex in themselves and also in the way that they interact with other inflectional categories. This section compares some moreand less complex gender systems and proposes a way to quantify their complexity. Examples come from the database of non-canonicality, which samples small but easily comparable inflectional subsystems from a few basic parts of grammar in order to get some view of complexity across the inflectional system: marking of A, S, O, G, T, and possessor roles on nouns; the same forms of inflectional pronouns; singular A and O marking in the most basic past and nonpast synthetic forms of verbs; inflectional classes of affixes for nouns, pronouns, and verbs; and inflectional classes of stems for all three. The paradigms in Tables 1–2 show the inflection of nouns in four grammatical cases in the singular of Mongolian (which has no gender) and Russian (which has three genders). Table 1: Mongolian (Khalkha; Svantesson 2003: 163, Janhunen 2012: 297–298, 106–112, 66–68; Janhunen’s transcription). Extension under- lined. ‘book’ ‘year’ Nominative nom or Genitive nom-ÿn or-n-ÿ Accusative nom-ÿg or-ÿg Dative nom-d oro-n-d Table 2: Russian (M = masculine, F = feminine, N = neuter). Extension underlined. ‘brother’ ‘house’ ‘book’ ‘window’ ‘net’ ‘time’ M.anim. M.inan. F N Fourth Fourth, Extended Nom. brat dom knig-a okn-o set’ vremja Gen. brat-a dom-a knig-i okn-a set-i vrem-en-i Acc. brat-a dom knig-u okn-o set’ vremja Dat. brat-u dom-u knig-e okn-u set-i vrem-en-i 66 4 Why is gender so complex? Some typological considerations Mongolian has only one declension class in terms of suffixes. There are some differences in suffixes (not shown), all predictable from the phonology ofthe stem (its final consonant and vowel harmony class). There are two stem classes: simple nouns as in ‘book’, and one with an -n- extension in certain cases,
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